← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript49 lines
- [00:00]
A
Today on A Sin in the Great Books podcast, we are discussing Plato and Saint Boethius. Yes, St. Boethius. And to guide us through this conversation, we are joined by Dr. Thomas Ward out of Baylor University. We'll first take up the question of who is Saint Boethius? And look at his consolation of philosophy. And we'll also look at his impact on the liberal arts tradition going into the medieval age. Saint Boethius is often called the last of the Romans in the first of the medievals, and he's called that for good reason. And the and then we'll look at in his constellation of philosophy, particularly what are all the Platonic influences that we can see looking at some of the Platonic dialogues and their impact or their imprint on St. Boethius's writings as well. It's a wonderful, somewhat quick conversation as far as Ascend conversations go, and we very much enjoy the guidance of Dr. Thomas Ward. Next week we'll be looking at Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas. The week after that we'll be doing a Q and A on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Dr. Justin Jackson. And the week after that we start Purg for Lent. Yes, Lent is already here and we'll have Dr. Jason Baxter on to discuss his new translation. But today join us for a wonderful conversation on St. Boethius in Plato. Welcome to Ascend to the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. I'm recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we can help you read the Great Books. We have over 50 episodes to help you or your small group. Read the Iliad in the Odyssey, 20 episodes on the Greek plays like the Oresteia, Antigone and the Clouds, and about another 20 episodes covering the platonic dialogues like first Alcibiades, the Apology and the Gorgias. So no excuses. You can read the Great Books with Ascend. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more information. Today we are moving from Athens to Rome and exploring the influence of Plato upon Saint Boethius, a Roman statesman, philosopher and theologian. To guide us in this discussion, we are joined by Dr. Thomas Ward, an associate professor at Baylor University whose main field of interest is the history of philosophy, especially medieval, and he has written several books, including After Stoicism Last words of the last Roman philosopher and also ordered by Love, an introduction to Don Scotus. Welcome to the podcast.
- [02:41]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [02:44]
A
Yeah, so you've written a book on Boethius, which sounds great, but also one on scotus. Can we just say something about that for a second? I think the. The Pope, Benedict 16th comes out in me a little bit when I hear scotus. So is this a. Is this a defense of SCOTUS that you've given this book?
- [02:58]
B
Yeah, I, I describe it informally as my attempt to rehabilitate Duns Scotus for faithful Catholics. I don't think he's as bad as he's sometimes made out to be. He doesn't. Is not as good as. As St. Thomas Aquinas, of course, but. But I think there's a lot there, and I talk about that in the book. The book is sort of written in this conciliatory spirit. You know, maybe. Maybe St. Thomas isn't quite as far away from Duns Scotus as some of the narratives might suggest.
- [03:28]
A
Okay, we will give you the benefit of the doubt is what we will do. Okay. That's what we will do for this podcast. Okay. So we, you know, we met actually somewhat recently at a Boethius conference that was held by the University of Tulsa. Dr. Jennifer has been on the podcast several times, so has Dr. Prudlow, both excellent people over there. And so we connected there. And so on the podcast here, we've been moving through Plato and we've been studying his dialogues, kind of looking at his influence. And, and so I had pitched out to you like, hey, can we maybe talk about the influence of Plato upon Boethius? Because I think he's this really massive intellect that doesn't get enough attention today. We don't really understand the role that he played in history. So maybe to kind of just kind of tee us off for those who are not familiar, like, who's Boethius and why should we read him?
- [04:16]
B
Good. So Severinus Boethius, saint and martyr that is sometimes forgotten, even by Catholics. So I'm glad that you introduced him by his title. He was a Roman senator at a time in. In. In Rome when it was no longer an empire. It had been conquered by the Goth. He served under King Theodoric until his death in 524. He was accused of treason against the king and probably falsely accused and sentenced to death and wrote this wonderful book, the Consolation of Philosophy, while awaiting his execution. And we'll talk about that later. I'm sure. But before writing the Consolation of Philosophy, when he was still an esteemed politician, he had this very active scholarly life. You know, not unlike you yourself, a lawyer by day and a great books reader by day. But he had this huge ambition to translate and comment on the works of Plato and Aristotle so that his fellow Latin reading and speaking Romans could benefit from Greek wisdom. He tells us this explicitly in his commentary on Aristotle's Categories. He had this idea that Plato and Aristotle were not as opposed to one another as tradition suggests. And even as Aristotle sometimes himself says, so he wanted both to synthesize them and, and to pass them on to his fellow Romans. So he wrote commentaries on several works of Aristotle, on Porphyry's Commentary or Isagoge to Aristotle's logical works or categories specifically. He never got very far in terms of the translation and commenting project. Very few translations, but he gave us a lot of. And it's hard to, it's actually almost impossible to overstate his influence on later philosophy and theology, especially in what we call the Scholastic period of the 13th and 14th centuries and even before that. I mean, Aristotle's logic, which was, which was logic until the 19th century, was preserved for Europe by Boethius single handedly. Really. It was Boethius's logical works that were studied as part of the trivium in the, in the Middle Ages. So, so there's that. His.
- [07:10]
A
He.
- [07:10]
B
He sees himself primarily as a kind of expositor or, or cheerleader for Greek philosophy. But in a way he undersells himself as a philosopher. He is a philosopher within the Platonic tradition. He's also heavily influenced by Stoics, correcting I think, what needs to be corrected about Stoicism. And in the Consolation of Philosophy and also in a series of short essays sometimes called the Theological Tractates, he really proves himself in original and very sharp philosopher and theologian.
- [07:49]
A
Yeah, sometimes I've heard it said that he is the last of the Romans and the first of the Scholastics.
- [07:56]
B
Yeah, I think that's very apt. And it's not just because in general he was influential on the Scholastics, but what we think of as sort of distinctive of the scholastic method in theology. Boethius was doing this in the 6th century, anticipating the kinds of work that we find say in St. Thomas Aquinas. What's distinctive here is this sort of effort to use the philosophical vocabulary and methods of Aristotle in particular for working through hard theological questions, whether it's the two natures and one person of Christ or, or the three persons in one nature of The Holy Trinity and so on. It's a very kind of logic oriented.
- [08:51]
A
Or.
- [08:53]
B
You know, fine grained semantic analysis, that sort of thing. You know, the Scholastics are famous for making their distinctions and Boethius anticipates all of this and really bequeaths that sort of legacy and that that really doesn't. I say that this is an Aristotelian method and I think that that's right. But I want to sort of bracket off what we might think of as an Aristotelian method from Aristotelianism and suggest that although Boethius learned a lot from Aristotle, he also learned a lot from Plato, of course, which is the main sort of take on Boethius that we're going to be exploring here. And so you could be Platonic in your convictions or your metaphysical views, even if you're exploring those things in a more Aristotelian methodology.
- [09:48]
A
Yeah, very good. Yeah. One thing I didn't really appreciate, I think, until I attended that conference at the University of Tulsa, was how much we were indebted to Boethius for simply the liberal arts and passing that along into the scholastic period. I had seen him, obviously he's very much referenced in St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, particularly on, like, Happiness, the Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius work also probably has the best treatment of the relationship between free will and then God being outside of time and how those two work together. But I was very unaware of the liberal arts side and that even particularly like music, that how music was done in the west, that a lot of this comes down to Boethius and like you said, the. Not only his, like, preservation of certain knowledge, but also how he was a philosopher and a liberally educated person in his own right.
- [10:39]
B
Yeah, like I said, hard to overstate his importance. You know, C.S. lewis famously said that to read the consolation of philosophy is to. Is to become enculturated into the Middle Ages, that there is something, something about its aesthetic sensibility, its doctrines that really shapes the medieval mind in profound ways. And not just the theologians and philosophers, but, you know, when we think of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages, Dante and Chaucer, both are hugely influenced by Boethius.
- [11:19]
A
Yeah. And he's also just a wonderful read. Like if you read the constellation of philosophy, he's poetic, it's beautiful, but he's digging deep into concepts. It's a wonderful, wonderful read. How did you get into Boethius? So you've written this text on him now, what kind of led you to write that work.
- [11:36]
B
It was my experience in the classroom teaching Boethius. It is a nice read and I've found over the years that students really engage with it. Almost all of my teaching is in the history of philosophy, either ancient philosophy or medieval philosophy. And by far the authors that students like reading the most of these time periods are Plato and Boethius. And I think it's because of the dramatic setting of the Platonic dialogues and the consolation of Philosophy, that's certainly part of it. But there's something about the sort of personal touch, the horrible circumstances Boethius finds himself in. The sort of self pitying that we find him indulging in at the beginning. It's all very relatable. Some of the teachings of the Consolation of Philosophy are very challenging, like literally hard to believe because they're so good. You think that it's too good to be true or something like that. But. But nevertheless the students, whether they agree or object to Boethius, just really get excited about it. And so the book kind of came.
- [12:50]
A
Out of.
- [12:53]
B
Times just working through the text with students and the kinds of objections they would raise, the kinds of the parts of the book that they had the most trouble with either simply understanding it or finding it too hard to believe. And I just tried to bottle what happens in the classroom into a book because I thought that sort of like what, what you're doing with Ascend, you know, these great books, if, if we've read them, most of us have read them in school, in college, but they're, they're books meant for a lifetime. And so I thought, well, you know, I'm able to give this experience to my students by introducing them to Boethius. Maybe the book will introduce non students to the same.
- [13:42]
A
Yeah, that's beautiful. No, I think the work is certainly evangelizes on multiple different fronts simply because it's beautiful. It's really not that long. In certain ways it's an easy read. It's difficult insofar as the concepts that you have to kind of grapple with. So maybe as we kind of shift into the influence of Plato on Boethius himself, maybe as a preliminary question is what works did Boethius actually have access to? And I know sometimes we have to reverse engineer this and you say that he was wanting to translate them. So maybe more than most, but when we, I think sometimes a misread or something I've felt that I fall into when you read the great books is that you just assume that every subsequent thinker had access to all the books that came before them in a lot of ways. Like if you look at St. Augustine, you know, sometimes it's, you know, presented that he really only had the Timaeus and maybe a few other works and that the corpus was very small. So when we talk about maybe Boethius wanting to do this, translations, or Plato's influence on Boethius, any, any insight into, like, what work probably actually had, you.
- [14:47]
B
Know, I don't know the answer to that question, I'm sorry to say. We don't see explicit references to specific dialogues. There's a sort of Platonic aura about the book. The conception of God as the summum bonum, of course, comes from Republic six, but whether what he actually had eyes on that, I don't know. And it's, it's curious that although he announces an intention to, to synthesize Plato and Aristotle and translate both, he only actually wrote commentaries on Aristotle. Now, that might have been because he didn't have time to get to the Plato and he just decided to do Aristotle first, but it might have been that he had limited access. But I'm sorry to say that I, I don't know the answer to that question.
- [15:46]
A
It is. I'm not sure if anybody does, to be quite frank. Right. So, I mean, I, I did a little bit of just investigating on my own because that's something that I've been trying to keep track of is like, wait, you know, because you see something, you're like, oh, that has to be pulled from the Republic, or this has to be pulled from here. But then they don't have these definitive lists and it's not clear in the culture. So sometimes this is a, I think, kind of a real quagmire that you can get into. But as you said, like, if you reverse engineer it and you say, hey, look, here's some parallel teachings that seem very clearly pulled from Plato, then, you know, it's. It's set forth that he probably had the Republic, he might have had the Phaedo, the Meno, maybe even the Symposium, but sometimes these things, and maybe you can help us clarify this. A lot of these things, and these Platonic ideas aren't coming straight from Plato to Boethius. They're getting filtered through what we call the Neoplatonics, which I realize sometimes is a heavy phrase. And you've already mentioned Plotinus and Porphyry and these other thinkers. So some of these concepts, I think, can be coming down to him in a certain way in which they're just like concepts that are ingrained into what is philosophy without actually having the text itself.
- [16:54]
B
That's right. Proclus would be another big influence here. Who himself thought Aristotle and Plato were not too far apart from one another. I mean, that really was. One would have characterized the Neoplatonists in terms of their consensus that Plato and Aristotle were reconcilable in the end. You also get this. You mentioned that maybe it's not so much the specific texts of Plato, but more just how, how philosophy was understood. Lady Philosophy at the beginning talks about certain schools of philosophy who have torn at her dress, have taken pieces of her dress away, but, and how they are wrong to do so. And there's something about the, the whole of philosophy is represented by the, this, this garment, this beautiful dress that Lady Philosophy wears. And if we think about what that might mean in the, in the, in the narrative context. Well, it's something like what, what Lady Philosophy represents to Boethius is not any particular school, but just philosophy. And it turns out that philosophy is broadly Platonic philosophy, even if, even if this or that doctrine can't be tied down to a specific text.
- [18:21]
A
Yeah. Plato is philosophy for many, many centuries. Yeah. So maybe just as like an introduction to the consolation of philosophy. And then maybe we can look at some examples. So my understanding of the text, you've already set it up historically that Boethius was basically betrayed. There were conspiracies against him. You know, I take this, that he was a very saintly man and that these accusations were not correct. And so he's thrown in the prison and so he's awaiting his, his execution. And so he decides to write this work, the Consolation of Philosophy. In a lot of ways, it reminds me, it reminds me of several things. First, it reminds me of Dante's Inferno, because what's interesting is that Dante puts, or excuse me, Boethius puts himself as a character in the text itself. So the, the fiction here is that we have Boethius who like you said at the beginning, is, is almost whiny and full of self pity about, look, this thing that's happened to me. And then Lady Philosophy comes and she kind of chastises him a bit. It's almost like Dante, the pilgrim in the Purgatorio, finally meeting Beatrice. And it's not a warm fuzzy meeting. Beatrice chastises him on several accounts. And so I find that interesting because a lot of times I think sometimes we struggle to separate the author from when they put themselves in the fiction. And here we see, I think, the saintliness of Boethius that he presents himself as kind of not a vicious character, but a character who is struggling to be at peace with their current situation. Right. I mean, who would not be? Right? You're in jail, unjustly awaiting an execution. But then he's speaking through both Boethius the character and Lady Philosophy. And it's in this dialogue that then throughout the text, he's basically undergoing a certain maturation of thought as she kind of pulls him along and he's asking her certain questions. And it seems very Platonic because it's. It's almost Socratic and it's dialogue. Right. So it's not a treatise, it's not like Aristotle, it's not instruction manual. This is a very beautiful text to read. There's a back and forth, and it's hard not to even talk about this without thinking of the apology that Socrates himself. Right. Had to sit and await an unjust execution. So as I kind of think of like the consolation of philosophy for those who haven't read it, in my mind, that's just like a quick snapshot setting it up.
- [20:35]
B
Yeah, that's wonderful. You mentioned the saintliness of Boethius in so portraying himself. I've thought of this in terms of the humility of Boethius and of course those are consistent thoughts. But yeah, just imagine the. For all posterity, he portrays himself as in a really bad way. Having lost sight of philosophy, Lady Philosophy complains that she no longer holds the seat of honor. In his mind, he has banished himself from the city of philosophers, a city in which all men are free. So he's really. He's really down on himself. And it's so well written that it's easy to forget that Lady Philosophy is just as much a part of Boethius the author's mind as Boethius the character. There's a connection. You mentioned the connection to Purgatorio and the meeting with Beatrice. There's also, I think, a good connection here to the Phaedo. You know, Socrates is with his friends on the day that Socrates is to die, and they're. And they're doing philosophy and there's some suggestion maybe that Socrates is trying to goad his interlocutors into working a bit harder, into taking up the dialectic on their own initiative. And so you get these Simmias and Cebes who are unsatisfied with Socrates arguments for the immortality of the soul, and push him and push him until. Until Socrates is sort of forced to give a more rigorous argument. And there you might think of Socrates as both the prisoner, but also the therapist helping his friends who he's about to leave behind. In the Consolation of Philosophy, by contrast, you have Lady Philosophy playing this therapeutic role. Boethius, of course, is the prisoner. But as Boethius's cure sort of takes hold, he becomes more and more eager to engage in the dialectic. It's after they have together had this vision of God as the good that which all seek, whether they realize it or not. And it's a very holy moment in the Consolation of Philosophy. And it's then that Boethius starts asking these hard philosophical questions. He's not complaining, he's not even really doubting, I think. I mean, he expresses concerns about if his hard questions can't have good answers, that might be bad for him. But I don't think that he's agitated by doubt. I think that he's now ready to do hard philosophy because Lady Philosophy has gotten him out of his own self pity and has turned his gaze toward the good. And so he can now engage in philosophy again.
- [23:54]
A
Yeah, maybe. One comment on there is that I, I would like to think more about the relationship between Lady Philosophy and Diotima and the Symposium. Right. So you see these female characters that very much come out, and I think that she plays a certain role too of Socrates, telling her how, you know, she tutored him in erotics and how there's this theory of ascent, this motif of ascent of the soul to divine beauty itself, which I think we see very much in Boethius as well. So, yeah, what's a good like foothold? So you've, there's many topics that we could take on, but what do you think is like maybe a good foothold? To start seeing the relationship between Plato and Boethius, particularly in this text, I.
- [24:32]
B
Find it helpful to think of Lady Philosophy's program with Boethius as having a destructive component and then a constructive or reconstructive component. And, and so we, we find Boethius in, in his cell. The Lady Philosophy visits him, as you say, chastises him a bit, but, but gently. You know, there's some tender moments where she, she takes her dress and dries his tears so that he's able to see before his tears were clouding his vision. And then she, in book two, walks him through the vicissitudes of fortune and how unreliable the goods of fortune are. In fact, they aren't really good for anything. And to the extent that one places his hope for happiness in those sorts of goods, he's bound to be miserable. And so all of this effort, the famous image of. Of Lady Fortune and her wheel and all of that, all of that is a basically Stoic critique of attachment to mutable goods. And it's not as though only the Stoics had this insight that we ought to detach ourselves from mutable goods, but has a very sort of Stoic flavor. But then, unlike the Stoics, who stop at a kind of desire for tranquility, the absence of pain, Lady Philosophy, starting in book three, begins this constructive program where she wants to lead Boethius to the source of true beatitude, not. Not mere felicity, but beatitude. And most translators don't. Aren't sensitive to that difference. I will say that the Goines and Wyman translation is sensitive to that. So it's easy for the reader to tell when lady philosophy is talking about true happiness, which is beatitude. And there, starting in book three, we get this idea of the good, usually the capital G good, as that which all men seek, whether they realize it or not, so that even when they are pursuing these goods of fortune, pleasure, wealth, so on, what they are really seeking is the good. And so we get this idea if in book two, the goods of fortune are only deceptive, alluring, and bound to let us down. In book three, we get this idea that they are images of this higher reality. And whatever we want, whatever we think we want when we desire these things, is really something that can only come from a possession of or participation in the good. So we go from goods of fortune as mere distractions to goods of fortune as images. And so in that constructive program, I think, is when we get the more Platonic elements of earthly things as shadows, of heavenly things, of the good as standing above all the absolute highest thing, and. And so on, so that. So that sort of deconstructive to constructive moment which happens at the beginning of book three and then right in the middle of book three, which ends up being almost exactly the middle of the whole book, of the whole work, of the consolation. We have Boethius and Lady Philosophy together, turning to God in prayer, asking for his help as they. As they continue following this holy path that they're on together.
- [28:29]
A
Do you think it's fair on this idea of this deconstruction first? Right. That seems to parallel so much what we see in Platonic teaching, what we see with Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. The first, there has to be this beautiful deconstruction. You think of first Alcibiades, where Socrates has to show Alcibiades that he doesn't really know. And I love that because, you know, I've used the example probably too much on the podcast, but Socrates shows Alcibiades that he actually doesn't know what justice is until Alcibiades is just frustrated, it's fine, I don't know what it is. What is it? And Socrates is like, well, I'm not telling you, we're moving on. The whole point was just to show you that you don't know what you're talking about. So that's really interesting parallel between those two that just like pedagogically is later philosophy following kind of that Socratic or Platonic pedagogy of first we have to kind of deconstruct of what we think we know and then actually come to know thyself, that kind of first principle of Platonic philosophy, to know thyself. And then from there we can build.
- [29:29]
B
Yeah, that's wonderful. So, right, I'm thinking right at the end of book one, she asks Boethius a series of questions. You know, do you, do you know where everything comes from? Yes, of course, it comes from God. Do you know where everything is headed? No, I don't know that. And also, can you tell me what you are? And he says, of course, I'm a, I'm a rational mortal animal. And she says, well, what more? Is there anything more? And he says, no. And then Lady Philosophy says, ah, now I know what's really wrong with you. You have forgotten what you are. You don't know what you are. And it's, it's very striking exchange one, of course, because it shows that Boethius lacks this sort of self knowledge, but also because as, as you know, a rational animal is the classical definition of man. So there's something kind of subversive or almost ironic here. Like philosophy herself hears the answer rational animal, and says, no, that's not the right answer, or at least that's not the whole answer of what you are. And not until you are able to see the something more are you going to be happy.
- [30:52]
A
Yeah. So in Dante's Inferno, I think he presents like a very negative, or, excuse me, in Boethius's constellation, philosophy is kind of very negative. Lady Fortune, we see that Dante kind of picks up, I think, a very positive version of Lady Philosophy, or, excuse me, Lady Fortune, she becomes like an agent of Providence. What about, what about his theory of the good? Because let me tell you what I think is that Plato never seems to tie together the good and God For Plato, these seem to still remain two distinct concepts, or at least he never bridges them for us. And so is this where maybe Boethius is taking a Platonic idea like the good, the form of the good which informs all things. You think of the allegory of the sun, you think of the cave. All these things that we're going to look at when we read the Republic together. So here is he. What would we say? Here is he taking a Platonic idea, in marrying it to a Christian one and saying, like, look, the theory or the form of the good is actually God. They play the same role. Like, what's he doing with this concept?
- [31:53]
B
Yeah, he. He is doing that. It's not original to him. I think it was really in the middle Platonists that you get this. This identification of God and the good. Philo of Alexandria is an important source here. But you're right, for anything God considered as, say, the efficient cause of the world, the creator of the world. Plato didn't have that notion. I mean, it was. There was the. If we take the Timaeus as representative of Plato's own views, you have the demiurge, who is a sort of fashioner of things, but the demiurge itself is looking toward the ideal realm in his construction. So really can't is nowhere close to, say, a Christian conception of God. But the sort of marriage of Platonism and monotheism, Jewish monotheism, at first, really did sort of set the stage for a Christian appropriation of Platonism. And we don't really get this explicit identification in. In Boethius. But it's interesting the way that Boethius does it through lady philosophy. You know, we get this. It's in book three, we get this suggestion that. Or this state assertion that everyone seeks the good. They seek it in different ways. And some are led astray to false things, thinking that they are the good. If we carefully attend to what we're really seeking, what we can find is that when people seek pleasure, they're seeking contentment. When people seek power, or when people seek political offices or social status, they're seeking power. When they do noble deeds, they're seeking a kind of fame or venerableness or whatever. So we get this sort of conjunction of qualities or attributes that people are going after always in these disparate ways. Because, you know, after all, one is seeking pleasure at the expense of fame. Brings us one type of good, but not the other type. So then she paints this kind of complex account of the good that everyone seeks really is the conjunction of all of these good things. Really, only by having all of these can we be truly happy. And it turns out the thing that has all of these attributes is divine, is God himself. So we get a kind of identification of the good with God by building up from the incomplete goods that people in fact seek and sort of pointing beyond those to the complete good that they're truly seeking or that, you know, that they the only thing that really can give them what they're seeking. And then at that point, once we have this sort of picture of a simple God who simultaneously combines all of these incomplete goods in his one simple essence, then we get this very Platonic movement from God as the good to God as happiness. So if God, if people are only happy insofar as they possess the good and God is the good, then we could say that to the extent that a human being is happy, they participate in the form of happiness. It's the one over many sort of move that we're so familiar with with Plato. So God is happiness. To the extent that we share in happiness, we share in divinity. So we get this sort of proto theory of theosis or divinization insofar as we are happy, we are God like. And it's actually kind of a startling claim that says there, there is only one God, but by participation there can be as many gods as you please.
- [36:20]
A
Yeah, it reminds me of the Republic, but also the Gorgias when he comments on happiness. And we get, you know, I'm more used to reading Aquinas, so some of the scholastic language is more in my head. But there he gets very close to talking about basically apparent goods, right, that the soul is seeking after all these things. And these things bring certain satiations and certain parts of the soul, right? The appetitive, the spirited, the intellect. They all seek certain types of goods, right? You might even say they have an eros, right, an erotic longing to satiate in certain types. But we see this, I think very much in the Symposium too, in which the Diotima lays this out really well. The whole problem is, is that your appetite for happiness is infinite, but your. All the goods around you are finite. And even in this pagan sense that I think then you see adopted very clearly into Boethius constellation of philosophy and really into Catholicism at large. Is that what that means? Is that your natural love, right? You're more in Latin, your, your eros, your erotic longing, more in the Greek. It's actually designed to be satiated in God because God is that infinite beauty itself, which then corresponds to an infinite appetite. And I think that's. And I. What's beautiful about all that is that a lot of that, almost all of that is discernible by philosophy. And then, and then Boethius picks it up and I think really perfects it, you know, through Christian revelation. Because, you know, at the end of Symposium, which you haven't read on the podcast, it will come after the Republic, you know, he climbs the ladder of love. The soul moves from these lower goods to higher goods. And at the top is, you know, Plato doesn't say God, he says the divine beauty itself. Right.
- [37:55]
B
It's.
- [37:56]
A
It's a little different. But we see very quickly how this gets adopted into Christianity and saying, no, you satiate first in God. That's what your soul's actually longing for. And then if you do that, it doesn't preclude all the lower goods, like, you know, me being married or even having a friendship or, you know, good food and drink with friends, but actually satiating God first and kind of cascades back down and perfects all these lower goods together.
- [38:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's very well said. It's, I think the foundation of Western mysticism really probably is the. The Symposium, the ascent through lesser goods to the finite good. And the sort of, this kind of, when you think about it, it's kind of mysterious idea that we find in Plato and throughout the tradition, that there can be this thing that we really truly seek that we don't know we are truly seeking. And it's a kind of spiritual commonplace. And so you can sort of miss out on just how kind of startling that is really when you think about it. I mean, what that says about human psychology and all of that. And, you know. But yeah, that's certainly present there in Constellation three, and it goes right back to the Symposium in particular, but other dialogues as well. There's also this. Another sort of Platonic thing that might be worth highlighting here is this difficult question that comes up in book four about Boethius is concerned that if God is the good and governing the universe providentially, why is it that God. It looks like bad guys get good things and good guys get bad things and that everything seems to be distributed randomly. It doesn't seem like God is rational in the distribution of goods of fortune. And the response is very interesting and comes straight out of Plato Gorgias, in fact. I think you might have to confirm that for me. The idea that lady philosophy runs is basically this, that everyone seeks the good, but the wicked, being wicked can't achieve the good. And so insofar as the wicked are wicked, they are weak because they can't get what they want. And after all, the definition of power is the ability to get what you want. So only the good are powerful and only the. Only the wicked are weak. So we get this. And that's one of the hard parts that students have trouble with because it seems so counterintuitive. It seems like obvious counter examples of bad people apparently happy and apparently powerful and so on. And so we have to have this kind of re evaluation of things if we are to see with the eyes of lady philosophy. But I think it's. I mean, I think the more one dwells on it, the more plausible it seems. If you buy that first premise about the good as that which everyone seeks, then the logic kind of follows. But it's one thing to follow the logic, and it's another thing to learn how to actually see the world that way. To look at the, the wealthy, powerful, wicked person and see someone pitiable and weak, that's hard to learn how to see that way. But Boethius can help us to start learning, start learning how to see that way. It is the Gorgias that I'm thinking of this connection.
- [41:58]
A
I believe so, because in the Gorgias, right, this is where he says we have to pity the tyrant. All the young men like Callicles, et cetera, they all want to be the tyrant. I just want to have this constant satiation of my baser appetites. And we had a wonderful episode on the Gorgias covering callicles with Greg McBrayer from the New Thinkory podcast. This is one of the things that we take up is that I think what's so counterintuitive that you see in Plato, you know, kind of through the character of Socrates, that then also is picked up through the teachings, you know, of our Lord and into Christianity, is that, yeah, this, this worldly power, not only is it not something that we should, you know, be jealous of, but rather we should pity that person. And he actually, Plato has a really fascinating line in there through the mouth of Socrates where he says, you know, if my enemy became a tyrant, I would want them to maintain and be a tyrant. I would not want them to actually stop being a tyrant, because being a tyrant is so bad for your soul. And of course, the Gorgias terminates in that, that beautiful myth in which, you know, basically as a, as a tyrant beats his slave, so does the unjust man beat his soul. And we, at the end of life, we present our souls to the judges. And, you know, some of us present them beautiful. Like, here's this, you know, virtue is a type of health and beauty to the soul. But then a lot of us present our souls, particularly the tyrant, and it's bruised and scarred and ugly, right? The body, all the trappings has gone away. Here's the soul, actually looks like. And I think you see that picked up pretty clearly in Christianity, but also in both Boethius, Consolation of philosophy. And I think it reminds me, too, of these. These claims, you know, that turn things on their head, where Socrates just argues that, you know, that you can't harm a just man.
- [43:41]
B
Yeah.
- [43:42]
A
And you're like, what? You can't. And you can't. You can't harm a just man. I think that in a lot of ways, as I've contemplated, that that's really at the heart of the west, because you see that in both the trial of Socrates and in the trial of our Lord, in which, like, you really can't actually. Do you think you can do harm to me, but you really can't actually make me do true harm. Right? My soul, my integrity, who I am, remains intact no matter what you do. And actually, throughout this, I will be benefited, right? I will grow in virtue. My soul will become beautiful through, you know, going through these sufferings. You are the ones actually to be pitied. You're the ones, right, the ones that crucified our Lord, the ones that condemned Socrates. You're the ones to be pitied because you actually have brought this ugliness upon your soul. So, no, I think. I think all these kind of streams flow into the constellation of philosophy. And you're seeing Boethius is, I guess, cosmopolitan in the absolute best sense of that term. Right. He's kind of bringing all of these things together and expressing them. Maybe you should say, or if you can say a little bit about this, because the genre is interesting, right? Because sometimes it's this dialogue and then it just breaks into a poem which is, to me, very Platonic, because you think of, like, the dialogues and then all of a sudden you get, oh, by the way, here's the myth of the Ring of Gyges, or here's the cave, or here's the myth of Ur, or the one at the end of the Gorgia. So any thoughts on kind of, like, the genre and why it shifts style sometimes and what. What he's trying to do there?
- [45:12]
B
So I mentioned earlier how there are parts that it's one thing to follow the logic and another to sort of Feel the truth of the conclusion. And I think part of what's going on with the poetry is sort of effort to form both. Both mind and heart, for lack of a better term. You know, both the affections and the intellect, or the will and the intellect simultaneously. The poetry does that through beauty, and the. The prose section do it through dialectic. And so we get this, I think, sensitivity to anthropology and I mean, really the best of rhetoric in the classical sense, that if we're trying to persuade someone of the truth so that they are, you know, have reasoned belief and the belief, you know, and what they. And what they know really seeks in and affects their lives in the way that it ought to, then we need to be working upon, so to speak, both. Both intellect and will. I think that's part of the story, I confess. I. I still find something elusive about the poetry that I feel like, as a philosopher, I'm not. I'm not engaging it quite as deeply as it ought to be engaged. You know, this would be a. If you wanted to do an episode on another episode on Boethius with a classicist or a literature scholar. I mean, that might be a good alternative angle on Boethius, but I think, at minimum, something that I find helpful is that kind of training of the affections through the beauty of the poems.
- [46:59]
A
That's beautiful. Yeah. So, okay, we've looked at or kind of commented on. I mean, this. You know, obviously Boethius is just kind of scratching the surface of here. We've talked about the form of the good. We've talked about kind of briefly, even this, like the Timaeus. And while the Timaeus has obviously certain distinctions from the Christian creation narrative, I think on a positive side, it does show that the world is ordered, it's intelligible. Right. These are some things that were passed down to us that are very Platonic. We've talked about the soul's ascent. Right. Picking up from the Symposium, but also there's several other places and in which Socrates will talk about the soul's ascent to God and how this works. But I. I really appreciate what you said about the Symposium, because I agree it really sets the pattern, really, for both pagan and Christian spirituality for centuries to come. And from someone who very much appreciates those texts, you think of St. Gregory of Nyssa or St. John Climicus, like these kind of thinkers. It's. It's just really beautiful. And then also kind of looking at the Neoplatonic influence as well, talking about virtue, happiness. Anything else, though, like any. Any Kind of like major area on the consolation that we haven't touched on. Or we say, oh, we talk about Plato and his influence. Like here's. Here's one area that we just haven't even mentioned.
- [48:15]
B
You know, there's. In book four, there's this theme of evil as privation that I think is a very important Platonic element. And we get these wonderful startling assertions of lady philosophy like evil men don't exist. And then she clarifies what she means. But the idea is that to be good is to be complete. It's a kind of perfection of one's nature. So insofar as we are falling short of our true nature, to that extent we're evil. But to the extent that we exist at all as some kind of thing, like for example, human being, we're good. Even if we're very bad people, we're still good insofar as we exist. And then we get these wonderful descriptions of men who. Vicious men who make themselves like beasts by their viciousness. You know, different kinds of, you know, the glutton is like a pig and the person prone to anger is like a wolf and so on. And so we get these sub human animals as types of disordered souls and, you know, so reminiscent of the Republic again there and the sort of tyrannical souls and so on. But yeah, so that sort of evil is privation this and maybe this general theme that one of the odd things about being human is that you're always becoming something more than human or something less than human. I mean, this is a sort of motif that just runs through the consolation, I think, in a subtle but really powerful way. Because happiness turns out the only way a human being can become happy is by being divinized. And then if you're not on your way to divinization, you can't just maintain some sort of status quo. You're actually descending into some lower form of life which is comparable to an animal, a brutish life. And so there is this weird thing about human beings. Yeah, we're creatures on the move one way or another.
- [50:39]
A
No, I like that. I like presenting it in that fashion. Yeah, the privation of the good. That evil is really a lack. Right. It's actually a non being. My understanding is that the Neoplatonics really helped flush that out, if you will, that kind of definition. But I'm actually reading currently I'm reading the Great Divorce to My Daughter. And this is like one of the best narrative presentations of this. Right. So we actually just got to the Scene. If you don't know for the listeners, if you don't know about the Great Divorce, the people in hell can take a bus and go visit heaven. And it's a. It's about why they all decide to go back to hell. But one of the things that's wonderful is that they. They come out of their bus, they. They realize that they're all ghosts, right? They're transparent. And they didn't realize this before, and they. They don't even have the weight to bend the grass, right? Like, this one character is, like, trying to, like, pick this dandelion, and it's like it's made of diamonds, but then the wind blows and it blows normally. So because everything in heaven is real, as real as it should be, it has this kind of full saturation of the good. Whereas in. Everything in hell is really this, like, you know, shadow, this absence of light. And so there. There's a. They suffer a certain privation or non. Being. So. No, I. I appreciate that too, because that's something I didn't realize until recently, really came from the Platonic tradition, because I think Aquinas gets kind of attributed to that a lot. But I didn't realize till recently that it was actually the Neoplatonics that had really first kind of like, filled that out. Yeah. No, very good. Any other kind of final thoughts on Boethius and the Platonic influence?
- [52:08]
B
No, no.
- [52:09]
A
I mean, this.
- [52:10]
B
Of course, there's so much more that we could. That we could say, I know we're getting close to time, but. But, yeah, we sort of scratching the surface. We plunged in a little bit here and there. But I'll say this, maybe in closing that Boethius is not a school philosopher, just as lady philosophy calls out Stoics and Epicureans for thinking that they had the whole of philosophy. Whereas the project of the consolation is to present all of philosophy. And it does turn out to be very Platonic. But as we've sort of alluded to a few times, there's, you know, whether it's a Neoplatonic theme or a theme that you also could find in Aristotle, or there is a kind of. A kind of Platonic aura that is more than the explicit Platonic references. And so while the influence of Plato on Boethius can't be overstated, I think we do better to think of sort of grand themes rather than tracing back to individual passages, even though sometimes we can do that.
- [53:18]
A
No, I very much appreciate that. I appreciate all the comments that you've given. I'll take the blame for our conversation being somewhat short because I have to hop off on a contract negotiation because my actual job calls. I wish I could sit around and talk about Boethius all day. That would be wonderful. But unfortunately, the attorney side is what I have to do mainly during the day. So I will take the blame for cutting this short. But this is great and you've given me a lot to think about. Tell us more about your book and where people can find more about you and your work. Great.
- [53:48]
B
Yeah. So Word on Fire, I'm sure familiar to your listeners, published the book last year. It's called After Stoicism. And I keep a website with, with links to my writings. And so that's my name, Thomas M as in Michael Ward dot com.
- [54:07]
A
Wonderful. Well, thank you again.
- [54:09]
B
Thank you, Deacon.
- [54:10]
A
All right, everyone. Next week we will be actually taking up the conversation of Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas with Dr. Donald Prudlow from the University of Tulsa. It's going to be a fantastic conversation. Go visit thegreatbookspodcast.com to see our reading schedule. We've got lots of good things ahead, including Plato's Republic. And we will see you next week.